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Walkom: Global warming? (Yawn). We don’t care about that any more.

For a while, it was the biggest story of the era. Global warming, we were warned, would alter everything — swamp coastal cities, turn farmland into desert, wipe out entire species of wildlife.

Al Gore was an international celebrity as a climate change poster boy for a time. Now he’s just somebody from before. (MARCOS MORENO / AFP)

As it turned out, these warnings weren’t overblown. North America’s main agricultural areas suffered a devastating drought this summer. Lower Manhattan was flooded this fall. Scientists confirm that the shrinking ice cap is making it harder for polar bears to survive in the Canadian Arctic.

Yet, as a political issue, climate change itself — the long term cause of these proximate disasters — has fallen off the radar.

In Canada, those who still think about such things tend to blame Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

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And it is true that the Harper Conservatives have been particularly cavalier about this issue.

They not only fail to act against climate change in Canada. They have deliberately sabotaged international efforts aimed at curbing global warming.

The biggest insult that the Harperites can muster against the opposition New Democrats is to accuse them of supporting carbon taxes.

That this charge isn’t quite true is bad enough (the NDP doesn’t support carbon taxes per se — although it probably should).

More interesting is the assumption behind the Conservative attack — which is that one of the few measures devised to deal with global warming is so outrageous as to be dismissed out of hand.

But Ottawa isn’t the only culprit.

As Ontario Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller pointed out in a scathing report this week, Queen’s Park is quietly backing away from its plans to deal with climate change.

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In 2007, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s provincial Liberal government announced a comprehensive strategy for curbing global warming, one that involved scaling back the use of coal-fired electricity plants, encouraging electric vehicles and persuading both industrialists and farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

To its credit, the Liberal government did phase out major coal-fired generating plants.

But it backpedaled in other areas and, by its own admission, is not on track to meet its own 2020 target for reducing greenhouse gases.

It has scrapped measures designed to reduce auto emissions. Its plans for so-called cap and trade programs aimed at cutting industrial emissions have stalled. Its attempts to encourage farmers to limit the use of emission-generating synthetic fertilizers haven’t worked.

Why the backsliding? Both the federal and provincial governments cite the economy.

The Harper Conservatives say they won’t do anything that threatens economic growth, particularly in the oil and gas industry. (That’s also the reason, incidentally, why they rammed through measures this week in the Commons that are designed to let the petroleum industry avoid environmental regulations.)

The McGuinty Liberals blame the provincial deficit. They say that if they are to address their budgetary shortfall, they just can’t afford measures aimed at weaning the province from its dependence on carbon.

Behind both governments, however, is a bleak political reality: There are no longer enough voters who care about climate change.

Let me rephrase that. We care. We just don’t care enough to do anything.

At one level, it is odd that humans are so blasé about global warming when its effects are so obvious.

At another, it is not. We are not a particularly far-sighted species. Our attention span is short, our collective memory shallow. For a while, Al Gore — the failed U.S. presidential contender who became the poster boy for climate change — was an international celebrity. Now he’s just somebody from before.

We fret about the economy — which is what we do to make a living. But when we do so, we forget about the environment — which is where that living takes place.

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